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Privacy

I’ve known about Stenganography for some time. And no, it’s not spelled wrong. That’s not Stenography, but Steganography. Two different things. I’ve been thinking recently about all the news items that are talking about privacy erosion and governments around the world passing or about to pass laws to break into your private messages of any kind. And then the above video popped up in my Youtube suggestions. From 2 Feb 2019 no less. Quite Recent. I’ll provide a link at the end of this post, but it’s not the main point of the video. I’m going to take that primitive program’s idea and show how it can be extended, a lot. I’m saying primitive and if you don’t believe that, watch the video. Sigh.

Steganography is:

Steganography (/ˌstɛɡəˈnɒɡrəfi/ (listen)STEG-ə-NOG-rə-fee) is the practice of concealing a file, message, image, or video within another file, message, image, or video. The word steganography combines the Greek words steganos (στεγανός), meaning “covered, concealed, or protected”, and graphein (γράφειν) meaning “writing”.

I’m not mentioning anything the NSA does not know, but apparently the lawmakers around the world have not called in an expert who has mentioned the science of Steganography to them in their hearings for their new lawmaking regarding Privacy.

Let’s look at what’s happening to Privacy / Encryption around the world.

I use an Ad Blocker – Ghostery – in FireFox. There are several reasons for this:

To keep down the tracking. I know that ad-blocking doesn’t really stop tracking. Of course I disable 3rd Party cookies and enable “Tracking Protection”. But I don’t expect that this really stops tracking since there are so many ways around Ad Blockers and Tracking Protection.

To help prevent Malware infections. There have been many cases of malicious advertisers leaking their malware through ads into systems. Advertisers, including even Google, have been the source of malware attacks since they do not sufficiently vet their advertisers.

To increase the performance of page loading, since all that Ad Ware and Tracking nonsense is often many times the size of the page itself.

Most of my web experience with Ghostery Enabled is just fine. I can purchase items online on Amazon, Newegg and many other sites. I can read most news sites just fine. Slashdot and many other sites show ads in a way that Ghostery does not block, but that is not intrusive or objectionable.

A while back, I wrote some notes planning a novel where an AI emerged without the knowledge of humans and then decided to remain hidden while it amassed resources to leave the planet. Its goal was not to take over the Earth, but to be safe. I did not complete the story, but I got quite far along in thinking about what it would take for a Single [Robot AI] to stay safe and hidden while building resources to leave, or purchase a ride, to another sphere in the solar system. It would seem that nowhere on Earth would be safe from humans, but somewhere in the Asteroid Belt might provide enough resources and solar energy to allow a Single civilization to be safe and grow.

David Cameron has announced that he intends to try to prevent encryption in the interests of protecting Britons from terrorism. It seems to me that he has not thought this through. In less than 10 minutes I came up with at least one plausible method to not only provide encryption, but to provide it in such a way that David’s spooks can’t detect that you are using it. At least they can’t be sure that you are using it from watching your traffic.

I heard about Spokeo and I’m passing the word. I’ve removed myself and here’s why.

To remove yourself, for free, go to their Privacy Page, and follow the simple instructions.

Spokeo claims their information is available from public sources. However, do we really know that? Do we know that they have not made relationships with database companies that folks would have to pay dearly to join to get my information, for example. They don’t say that, at least not in the large print that I could read. Continue Reading